R Weasley: A Grave Undertaking
by lil-sea-salt
Summary: A twenty something Ron Weasley starts to become fascinated by muggles like his father before him. He decides to join the British Army to find ways to improve wizard society. Hijinks, hilarity and heroism ensue.


Molly Weasley was knitting by her fireplace. Not like same Muggle who did it by hand. Merlin's beard, she was snoring on a comfy armchair by a roaring fireplace. The cutlery in the kitchen was wild with activity folding, frilling a beautiful set of warm biscuits. The plates set themselves down as a well worn tablecloth rolled into place. The needles clacked on her nose as she awoke. She swished her wand to steady the scene.

"Good morning mam!" There was a raucous knock at the door. "Is there a Ronald Weasley in residence? This is the Royal Mail with a letter for a Mr. Ronald Weasley."

The door flung open and the dinky mailman looked in shock as a tired woman with greying ginger hair dressed in robes stared at him violently. "What on-what am I supposed to do?"

"Can you sign here man it took me ten days to find your residence, nasty bluggers you have roving around in the garden whatever they are." The mailman tipped the clipboard in Molly's direction. He clicked the pen before handing it to her. She raised her eyebrows at the weird contraption before signing with a flourish. Later he would be sitting at the village pub wondering where he'd been the last few days, his wife furious on the phone.

Molly opened the letter and read it's contents. She couldn't placate the meaning of the words before her bum of a son came down for breakfast. He ambled into the room quietly so not as to disturb her and had a piece of toast shoved into his mouth. Ron turned to return up the stairs when his mother deftly cut him off. She waved the opened letter at him.

"Ronald Weasley I raised you to be a wizard not some Muggle who can do tricks. What is this? Why are you taking a job with the Muggle airplane commission? Has your father put you up to this?"

Ron scooped the letter out of his mother's hands, effectively dropping the pancakes and breaking the plate. "I just decided it might help me get a ministry job like Dad or Harry."

"You want to be like the-boy-who-lived or the boy-who-died. This is more dangerous than Charlie going off to Romania for dragons. Perfectly preposterous."

The fireplace flashed with green flames as Arthur Weasley dusted his robes and smiled widely at his wife and younger son. He'd overheard some of the conversation/ "Now, now dear, he's going off into the unknown and becoming a man."

"Arthur, don't encourage him. He's right to getting killed or getting carted off to Azkaban."

* * *

Ron was trapped in his parents arguments, but later stole away upstairs to find Hermione brushing her hair out. She noticed the letter in his hand and with a nonverbal spell snatched it away from him. He reacted to grab it but was pushed back by an invisible force. Hermione was unfazed by his irritation as she unfolded the letter. She stiffened as the heaviness of its contents weighed on her. She tore it into pieces and burned it before turning to face him.

"No. You're not pursuing that as an avenue to find work. You can work for me." Her face was set in stone.

Ronald took a deep breath before he broke. "Bloody hell, it's a deployment. I wanted to try and find new things and use them for Ministry departments. I want to put more Muggle things into the wizarding world like phellyphones and the moving picture box. I want to try."

"But Ronald, you don't need an army deployment for those things. We can buy them or you could go into your dad's shed and take them apart and put them back together like he does. You could enchant another car to fly if that's what you want. This is serious Ron, you're going to see people die and not be able to do anything about it. I don't think you'll be able to leave things alone. If you can't the Ministry will get involved and you've seen how nasty they were with Harry."

"I'm tired of Harry being the one in dangerous situations all the time. I want to get out and see things."

"Ronald, I want you to look for another option. If you're so set on a Muggle job, why not work in a restaurant or charity shop or you could be a postman?"

"I want to serve my country. I think this would be a golden opportunity. I won't get a chance like this again."

Hermione crossed her arms, "I can't support you in this. I'm not going to."

For the rest of the day, Hermione and Ron went on without speaking to each other. Finally when they went to sleep without touching, curled on opposite ends of the trundle bed Molly had set up for them. Ron was awake the whole night wondering what other option he could use to get into a similar situation as his friends. He just wanted to keep up with them career wise. He was tired of being the weakest link.

Hermione was up and gone before Ron could apologize. He knew she was hands tied at the Ministry with her promotion and all. He knew that even if she disagreed with him, she would let him fail and learn his lesson. He cleaned his old astronomy telescope and aimed it out the window at the Muggles outside the Burrow in the small village adjacent.

Outside the folk milled. They bought newspaper without moving texts and pictures. The headlines were simple world issues that would abate with time. The crowd queued for the public bus to arrive for them to go off to work. A hostess wearing too many colored pigments stood with a tube of lipstick reapplying it. A man with a round belly had whipped cream from a tart smeared in his moustache. An older woman with an ice frost of hair and no eyebrows slipped a key out of the pocket of the man in front of her, If anything it was interesting and invigorating.

It was a world he was set he was going to explore-with or without his deployment.


End file.
